JEWS PASS WARSAW GHETTO STORY ON TO STUDENTS

The Germans wore uniforms of black and field gray in that spring of 1943; they carried all the weapons of a modern army.

The Jews of Warsaw wore street clothes. A few had guns. Those who did not threw stones and homemade bombs.

They fought the Nazis for three weeks rather than submit to mass murder in the concentration camps. Most died.

"It was an expression of their courage, their faith, and their dignity to live -- and, if need be, to die -- as Jews even in the face of Nazi terror," said Arthur Teitelbaum, director of the Anti-Defamation League's Miami office.

Monday is the 50th anniversary of the Warsaw ghetto uprising. It was not the only time Jews resisted the Nazis. Contrary to what Teitelbaum calls "the unhealthy myth that Jews did not resist," they did fight back.

In the Birkenau concentration camp, Jewish prisoners even blew up a crematory.

But the Warsaw uprising is the most famous. Vastly outnumbered, Polish Jews taught the world lessons that are as relevant today as they were then.

"The universal message of the uprising is that, in the face of great evil, people can continue to resist even though they know in their hearts that they are doomed to die. It is a testimony to their strength and to the strength of the human spirit," said Sharon Horowitz, principal of the Judaica High School in north Broward.

Half a century later, the story of the uprising is told in Hebrew schools and is celebrated annually in many synagogues.

"We teach our children about the Warsaw revolt as part of a course on the Holocaust," Rabbi Lewis Littman of Temple Bat Yam in Fort Lauderdale said.

Others learn about it through a program called the March of the Living, which takes them from the Warsaw ghetto to the Auschwitz concentration camp.

The trip is a powerful experience.

"I was in awe of the courage it took for those people to stand up against this seemingly invincible force," said Jason Kemper, a junior at the University School at Nova University.

But while Jews learn about the Warsaw uprising, many non-Jews remain ignorant of it and even of the Holocaust.

"We just did research trying to find out what Americans know about the Holocaust (and) 65 percent of adults and 63 percent of the high school students in the survey said that (it) seemed impossible that the Nazi extermination of the Jews ever happened," said Bill Gralnick of Boca Raton, regional director of the American Jewish Committee.

But non-Jews should learn the lessons of Warsaw because they transcend race, ethnicity, and religion, Horowitz said.

The fact that Warsaw's Jews had to defend themselves at all is a lesson in itself, Teitelbaum said.

"Germany was a technologically and culturally advanced society that became morally corrupt and reached a level of bestiality unknown in the modern world. The Holocaust would not have been possible without the complicity of millions of ordinary people who cooperated with Nazi criminality or stood silent in the face of it," he said.

"The uprising teaches us that our freedoms must be guarded vigilantly. There are those who would imitate and resurrect Nazi brutalities and who care nothing for America's democratic heritage. We dare not ignore them," Teitelbaum said.

Gralnick said, "Those who are left with the legacy of the survivors have a helluva race to run to deliver the moral message of the Holocaust. When you see what the Serbs are doing to the Bosnians, you realize that they may be blowing up defenseless women and children as a means to their end, and you begin to get a taste of what mankind is capable of," he said.

"And when you do, you've got to say to yourself that, no, the Holocaust wasn't an aberration; it's something that human beings are capable of doing again."